Take note of Bob Graham

Could Florida's popular Senator be Al Gore's Veep?

By Ann Blackman

July 10, 2000
Web posted at: 4:45 p.m. EDT (2045 GMT)

Al Gore may be Washington's best known control freak, but when
it comes to minutiae, he has nothing on Bob Graham, who these
days appears on nearly everyone's short list of possible Gore
running mates. The Florida Senator has been filling notebook
after notebook--close to four thousand of them to date, color
coded by season. He has kept a running account of his every
waking moment for the past 23 years--14 in the Senate, eight in
the Governor's mansion, even his days in the state legislature.
Graham writes down every meal, every meeting, every person he
meets. No item is too small. "I would rather have more detail
than less," Graham told TIME. On the September day in 1994 his
daughter Cissy gave birth to a son, his notebook read:

"I use [the notebooks] as a working tool," Graham says. "I
review them for calls to be made, memos to be dictated, meetings
I want to follow up on and things people promise to do. I would
be reticent to be too open in describing personal feelings and
emotions."

Yet the notebooks are vital to understanding Graham's outlook on
life. His half brother Phil married Katharine Meyer, whose
father owned the Washington Post, and the couple were at the
epicenter of the Washington social whirl of the 1960s. But at
49, Phil, a manic-depressive, killed himself. Bob Graham was 27
at the time. "Phil's legend was both inspiring and
intimidating," says a person who knows Graham well and asks to
remain anonymous. "After you see your brother commit suicide,
one of the things you seek is control. No wild behavior, no
profanity, no risk, loudness or recklessness of the kind Phil
exhibited. Be self-disciplined. A form of it is that notebook."

Graham is an able if not exactly charismatic Senator with a good
track record on education and environmental issues. This isn't
his first experience as a potential running mate. Gore aced him
out in 1992. In 1988 Michael Dukakis came calling but discovered
Graham had played an adulterous husband in a Jimmy Buffett video
called Who's the Blonde Stranger? Graham confessed that he had
perhaps shown poor judgment. But that wasn't the problem. "They
were concerned I hadn't listed any payment on my
financial-disclosure form," Graham says. "But Jimmy never paid
me a dime."

Graham does have a weakness for music. Friends and relatives
roll their eyes when he breaks into one of his favorite campaign
ditties: "I'm a Florida cracker, I'm a Graham cracker." "He'll
sing it at the drop of a hat," says historian and Truman
biographer David McCullough, whose son Bill is married to
Graham's daughter Cissy. When grief-stricken Miamians took to
the streets two weeks ago as news spread that Elian Gonzalez was
returning to Cuba, Graham began composing a sympathetic
operetta, setting the little boy's saga to music. In a mythic
scene, Elian's mother emerges slowly from the ocean, her gown
drenched, and softly, in a voice that gradually grows louder,
she sings of her loss. "She's like the commentator in Evita,"
Graham explains, humming a few bars. Can he work in a Tennessee
waltz?